Five generations and a bit of common sense

Your Voice

As much as the coal industry likes to make themselves appear to be the saviors of coal miners and communities, many of us know the truth and can speak to it. Sadly, there are a lot of miners and their families who underestimate the power of their stories.

The fact of the matter is, the more voices we have, the more we can shed light on the truth, and the better our chances at bringing the change we need—especially for our children. It’s as simple as that.

This page is a space for people to lend their stories, beliefs, and understandings about how the industry has shown its ugly sides. Feel free to post in the comment section below. If you fear retribution from the coal companies, feel free to come up with a different name and e-mail address.

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Apart but the same in may ways, the military person and the coal miner have been type cast by the political machine and the press and greater society have run with that. Never a miner myself I write from the perspective of a former soldier who enlisted to fight in Afghanistan after graduating college. From what I’ve read, and seen and heard I think we share a common affliction of being glorified for our physical and mental burdens and caricatured as a sort of archetypal ‘good American’, a mythological and homogenous species with a very defined set of beliefs and behaviors. This is a disservice to the real men and women who occupy these jobs and are in fact a complex and varied population. The Coal Industry like the Military Industrial complex have used this character well for their benefit. I see coal miners paraded on TV at the White House, ostensibly to build the logic that a good hard working people employed by coal, then what is good coal is good for them, don’t we want to see these people do well by extension of their industry? I don’t mean to say those people might not love their jobs, but perhaps it is more a factor of what they know and where they were born and the industry holds a place in their lives that would be occupied by another under different circumstances.

Its clever advertising that makes effective use of tribalism and patriotism to sell a story. I think we need to flip the narrative from what is good for the industry is good for the people, to what is good for the people is good for the people and if that is industry then so be it, but it might not be.